"To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom....Since our office is with moments, let us husband them."Ralph Waldo Emerson

Monday, December 10, 2007

A couple of my friends have mentioned this website on their blogs, and I've also read about it on other random blogs so I finally checked it out today. It's completely addicting. And that's such a good thing. FreeRice.com is a free vocabularly builder for English. The catch, if you can even call it that, is for every correctly answered question 20 grains of rice is donated to those in poverty. For free! The level of the vocabulary is adaptive so there is no reason not to do it, whether you're in 2nd grade or a Ph.D. I've already wasted half an hour there today. I highly suggest you do the same.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Daniel - I found the free rice site the day before your posting. It's truly addicting! Hope your last few days abroad are great. I've enjoyed following your blog. Hope you have an easy trip home. We'll see you New Year's Eve. Love, Aunt Ellen

Free Rice...yeah, it's addicting and fantastic. And whenever I miss points, I seem to always have to build up and get at least to the next level. haha. Thankfully this just distracts me from my work instead of finals. :-)

Sayings

"Realize the truth. Love beauty. Wish for the good. Do the best."Moses Mendelssohn

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"The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose."Nick Hornby

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"And why should one deceive oneself? It is the most futile and unprofitable pastime."Fyodor Dostoevsky

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"Even if there is only death after death (after death), be grateful for small favors -- sometimes there is birth after sex, for example. And, if you are very fortunate, sometimes there is sex after birth!"John Irving

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"Words, when they've been captured and imprisoned on paper, become a barrier against the world, one best left unerected. Everything that happens is fluid, changeable. After they've passed events are only as your memory makes them, and they shift shapes over time."Charles Frazier

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"If you knew that tomorrow afternoon the sun would flame up and consume all the world, would you spend the time between now and then praising the beauty of creation or would you sit in a darkened room cursing God with your last breath?"Charles Frazier

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“And for so long I have hated my nature for failing to say what I felt. And most of all for not acting on it. You live with such choices until you die."Charles Frazier

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"Grief is not a thing that can be convincingly shared with an audience. Our worst pain is confined within our own skin."Charles Frazier

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"For even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome my pride, I should probably be proud of my humility."Benjamin Franklin

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"Rarely use Venery but for Health or Offspring; Never to Dullness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another's Peace or Reputation."Benjamin Franklin

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"A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty. We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven. Such a day is a truce to vice."Henry David Thoreau

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"But it is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness."Herman Melville

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"All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor!"Walt Whitman

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"A man said to the universe:'Sir, I exist!''However,' replied the universe,'The fact has not created in me'A sense of obligation.'"Stephen Crane

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"In short, there are three things that last: faith, hope, and love; and the greatest of these is love."I Corinthians 13:13

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."Matthew 6:34

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"When one's good deeds exceed one's wisdom, that wisdom will be enduring; but when one's wisdom exceeds one's good deeds, that wisdom will not be enduring."Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa

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"The trick is to pay attention to what is going on around you long enough to behold the miracle without falling asleep. There is another world, right here within this one, whenever we pay attention."Lawrence Kushner

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“All smell is, if it be intense, immediate acute disease; and eventually we may say that, by depressing the system, and rendering it susceptible to the action of other causes, all smell is disease."Edwin Chadwick

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“This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age."Steven Johnson

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"However profound the threats are that confront us today, they are solvable, if we acknowledge the underlying problem, if we listen to science and not superstition, if we keep a channel open for dissenting voices that might actually have real answers."Steven Johnson

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"This is the sorrowful state of souls unsure,Whose lives earned neither honor nor bad fame.And they are mingled with angels of that base sortWho, neither rebellious to God nor faithful to Him,Chose neither side, but kept themselves apart --Now Heaven expels them, not to mar its splendor,And Hell rejects them, lest the wicked of heartTake glory over them."Dante Alighieri

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"Incidentally, it is not absurd to class the ecological role of humankind in its relationship to other life forms as a disease....humanity discovered new techniques allowing fresh exploitation of hitherto inaccessible resources...Looked at from the point of view of other organisms, humankind therefore resembles an acute epidemic disease."William H. McNeil

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"In the healing relationship, however, the orientation to the other is inevitably more intimate, and unequal; but since the very point of the relation is to work toward the transcending that inequality, and since the moral imperative at its heart is to be responsive to a full person in need of help, it seems to me far more accurate to understand it as a form of mutual relationship; specifically, a relationship of trust and care, which I take to be the essence of dialogue."Richard M. Zaner

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"We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it."Dave Barry

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"So long as we do not know the date of our deaths then for each of us the 'rest of our lives' is of indefinite duration."John Harris

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“Do all the good you can,By all the means you can,In all the ways you can,In all the places you can,At all the times you can,To all the people you can,As long as ever you can.”John Wesley